Nietzsche and Heidegger saw in modernity a time endangered by nihilism. Starting out from this interpretation, David Levin links the nihilism raging today in Western society and culture to our concrete historical experience with vision.

David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in The Philosopher's Gaze. Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, using our culturally dominant mode of perception and the philosophical discourse it has generated as the site for his critical reflections on the moral culture in which we are living.
In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, one way or another, the distinctive pathologies of the modern age....

This is a unique study, contuining the work of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and using the techniques of phenomenology against the prevailing nihilism of our culture. It expands our understanding of the human potential for spiritual self-realization by interpreting it as the developing of a bodily-felt awareness informing our gestures and movements. The author argues that a psychological focus on our experience of well-being and pathology as embodied beings contributes significantly to a historically relevant critique of ideology. It also provides an essential touchstone in experience for a...

For Greek antiquity, the question of right or fitting measure constituted the very heart of both ethics and politics. But can the Good of the ethical life and the Justice of the political be reduced to measurement and calculation? If they are matters of measure, are they not also absolutely immeasurable? In critical dialogue with texts by Plato, Holderlin, Rilke, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Levi, the author argues that the question of measure has become ever more urgent in the context of a modernity pressured by the conditions of a technological economy and...

In this probing look at Alfred Doblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz and the stories of W. G. Sebald, Redeeming Words offers a philosophical meditation on the power of language in literature. David Kleinberg-Levin draws on the critical theory of Benjamin and Adorno; the idealism and romanticism of Kant, Hegel, Holderlin, Novalis, and Schelling; and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. He shows how Doblin and Sebald--writers with radically different styles working in different historical moments--have in common a struggle against...